Roger Pearse

Many years ago people used to quote some passages from Hoffman online. Eventually I went and looked those passages up in Chadwick's standard translation of Contra Celsum (with some difficulty, since Hoffman did not indicate the source of each passage). I also looked up the reviews in L'Annee Philologique.

The material and my examination is here.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

andrewcriddle

Hi David

It is quite possible that Pamphilus edited Contra Celsum so as to avoid ideas he felt to be unsound, but a/ there is IIUC no positive evidence whatever that he did so, and b/ there is no guarantee that such hypothetical efforts would have made Contra Celsum more acceptable to post-Nicene orthodoxy, (conceivably the reverse).

Andrew Criddle

Roger Pearse

For general readers: Pamphilus and his disciple Eusebius wrote an Apology for Origen in six books, of which only the first survives. This is unfortunate because book 6 consisted of a complete list of Origen's works, which would be valuable to have now.

The difficulty I have with the idea that Pamphilus edited the works of Origen to remove heretical material is that it seems anachronistic. Surely the point of making a defence of Origen is that you believe his views were NOT heretical? Was Origen generally considered dodgy ca. 300? I think not.

Now Rufinus removed material from his translations (so Jerome tells us, in a polemical treatise attacking Rufinus in the bitterest terms) precisely because he removed heretical material. It seems clear that there were minor passages which by 400 could only have a heretical interpretation, but that Rufinus felt (correctly) that the whole was valuable and the editing worthwhile to allow the text to circulate. Since those translations continued to circulate in Latin into the Middle Ages, he was right on that.

But did Pamphilus and Eusebius think in this way? Is there evidence that they did? I have my doubts. Surely their apologia suggests that they did not.

It's also worth considering that the origenist disputes, that kicked off ca. 400, were rather political in tone, with people like Theophilus of Alexandria changing sides in the process. Rufinus may well have removed some material, simply to avoid getting dragged into the power struggle then going on. But such considerations could hardly apply ca. 300 AD.

I've not looked at the intro to Chadwick's edition, and of course we can no longer ask him why he put that statement there. It would be interesting to know, all the same.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

andrewcriddle

Hi Roger

Just to clarify.

What Chadwick said (in a 1957 JTS article, not his edition of Contra Celsum) was that our text of Contra Celsum appears to go back to an edition by Pamphilus. According to Chadwick this edition was an attempt to deal with the corrupt state of the text of this work and sometimes involves duplicate readings where different manuscripts disagreed, and gaps where there was clearly something missing in all manuscripts available to Pamphilus. Chadwick made no suggestion that Pamphilus had removed controversial material.

I should have made clearer the distinction between what Chadwick claimed and my comments on its possible implications. My apology for any misunderstanding.

On the other hand Pamphilus is generally held to have written the Apology in response to serious concerns about Origen's orthodoxy. See for a good discussion Apology for Origen.

The problem was that Pamphilus's defense of Origen against the specific charges he faced c 300 may have overemphasised the distinction between Father and Son in Origen's teaching, and hence increased Origen's vulnerability to charges of Arian sympathies in the post-Nicene church.

Andrew Criddle

Edited to Add

The 1957 JTS article by Chadwick is a review of Schurer's edition of the Tura papyrus containing extracts from Contra Celsum. IIUC Chadwick is following Schurer in his comments about the Pamphilean edition of Contra Celsum.

Roger Pearse

I've now obtained the article, and also the intro to Jean Scherer's publication, Extraits des livres I et II du Contre Celse d'Origene: d'apres le papyrus no 88747 du musee du caire, 1956. The latter is a most interesting discussion indeed.

The 7th century Tura papyrus contains long extracts from book 1 and book 2, made by a learned monk who had Origen's book before him and needed to make a copy of striking passages. It belongs to the same family as the 13th century Vatican codex, which also preserves in a remarkable manner a system of punctuation by longer or shorter blank spaces -- the words are not divided in the papyrus.

At the end of book 1, there is a colophon: "Revised and corrected from the copy of the books of Origen himself." This seems to be the basis for the link to Caesarea, which is indeed reasonable.

Further to the original context, the "edition" is more like a critical edition, including variants in the margin, not a set of changes to the text as one poster supposed.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Equally interesting, and bound with the above in the Cambridge copy, was a publication by Scherer of the papyrus of the Commentary on Romans by Origen. Unfortunately I was unable to make a photocopy, but the introduction examined the question of just what Rufinus did, using the Latin text of the Commentary, and catena fragments.

stephan huller

The overall manuscript quality of all pre-Nicene Alexandrian Fathers is consistently poor. Whenever you read the modern scholarship on Clement all they do is argue about word substitution and sentence construction

Littlejohn

Sorry, but where is the difference? ...


Greetings

Littlejohn

.

Roger Pearse

Look at who is saying what.

Hoffman says "Celsus says the Christians uses the myths of Danae etc ...".

What the text actually says is "Celsus introduces a Jew who starts talking about the myths of Danae".

Hoffman's book is not a description of the argument, remember. It's supposed to be a *translation*.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Erm, that's what text critics do.... about everything.